Baronesses of the Fourth Exile

Eclectica: http://www.eclectica.org/v14n4/ahmad.html

All women, by virtue of being second-class citizens, live in exile. If you don’t believe me, ask Euripides. Exile to the south—the political south, the economic south, the social south, the sexual south. In a nutshell, the public south and the private south. This, I will call the First Exile.

Then, some find themselves in Second Exile. This is when we feel kicked out from within. The angry and melancholic recognition of being a minority. Exiled by and into realization. This is when we feel alienated, because most around us don’t seem to feel the same way. AKA, the “no-one-understands-me” drama-queen syndrome.

Some of these women remain cauldrons of bubbling wrath-potion, and some boil over and spill out to be rejected, ridiculed, misunderstood, labeled different, strange, or even too anal. Misfits in most “normal” circles, they are inmates of a soft alienation: the Third Exile.

Few others end up seeping through skins too porous to respond to the rage with sympathy or deflect with indifference at best. Some of these women are the writers I will be talking about. They burned. Then they burnt some. Such rude awakenings they were! Such strong antidotes to the system-infused sedatives, that they were banished from their own homes like witches on broomsticks with two buttons—”Out” and “Away.” These women are now in the Fourth Exile.